


start by pulling him out of the fire

by thefirewildling



Category: American Horror Story, American Horror Story: Apocalypse, American Horror Story: Coven, American Horror Story: Murder House
Genre: But Still Canon, F/M, this is slightly twisted, yeah I just love them, yeah that episode floored me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-19
Updated: 2018-10-19
Packaged: 2019-08-04 04:55:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16340198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefirewildling/pseuds/thefirewildling
Summary: Violet likes to think of them as Orpheus and Eurydice retold, except he isn’t even alive and she can no longer be saved. Or maybe they’re Hades and Persephone, instead. Her, abducted from the world of the living, him, engulfed by gloom. Neither of those stories probably end as bad as theirs did, though.or: Tate and Violet, living in the after





	start by pulling him out of the fire

**Author's Note:**

> yeah so, this is my attempt to contribute and to give some continuity to that beautiful episode of yesterdays that im sure crippled you as much as it did me. sorry about any possible typos and incoherences, I did try my best.

Time doesn’t pass for the dead, she knows that much. But the new family has a calendar hanging on the wall of her bedroom, of _his_ bedroom, and so she wonders what it will be like when it will stop saying 2012 and add another decade, another century.

She has no idea how it hasn’t been a century. She knows better than to count the Halloweens, or the limited number of trips outside, because of the unforgiving and merciless depression that will come to when she remembers it’s just a single one. She’s lonely. She’s lonely and he knows it, because their card games moved to solitaire matches on the floor of the room and the Ramones stopped singing, because the power has been out since they found her body in the basement and put the house for sale. Again.

And so the room isn’t hers anymore, or _his_. It belongs to some asshole named Gabriel who blasts crap ass music that echoes through the house. So she appears to him, as Tate once did it her, out of nowhere and with no possible explanation for being there, but the human brain can’t conceive that the dead roam the house. ‘I live in the neighborhood.’ She says. It’s not a lie, is it? Maybe that’s why he believes it.

He doesn’t play the songs she recommends, and she figures he’s even more of an asshole than before, but she smiles because he says she’s twisted (Oh boy if only he knew) and because she knows Tate isn’t far.

In all fairness, he’s never far. Violet feels his eyes on her, catches glimpses of his green sweater at every corner she manages to pass by, like a painful reminder of everything that has towered over her family, of everything taken away from her. Every breath, every sun kiss, every haven she had left.

She recalls having privacy, having a life, however boring it might have been.  Here, in this house, with almost a century worth of dead people, she redeems herself by pretending to like her now dead family, by taking care of a blameless baby who barely knew what life was before being stuck here forever.

She feels like she’s the canary to the coal mine, the one put at proof at every stage of havoc. The after-credits scene isn’t a fairytale, it’s the epilogue you don’t want your children to read. It’s taunting, like some sort of cosmic joke someone threw at her.

Normally, when you’re tired of life you wish you’d be dead. When you’re dead, what do you wish for?

 

___

 

She bursts through her old room as Tate tries to slit Gabriel’s throat.

She senses it before she even hears it, really. Maybe it’s a dead sort of feeling. Maybe the dead get a sixth sense, who knows?

“Tate, no.” The tears in his eyes match hers as he moves his head just enough to stare back at her. She restrains herself, from her love, from her almost disgust for him. You’re locked in the house with whom you’re forbidden to love, unwilling to forget. It’s hard. Even for the dead. “Put down the knife, Tate.”

“I can't.” His voice breaks. Gabriel struggles harder under his grasp, making it even worse. "I'm doing this for you. I couldn't save you.”

It startles her, more than she is willing to let show. He tried to save her, at least. He stayed with her as she died, even if she didn’t remember. She just knows it, never doubted it for a single second. Her parents didn’t even notice she’d been dead for months.

“It's my fault you're alone.” The hand that holds the knife trembles.

“But I'm not alone.” She’s lying and they both know it. She makes Christmas trees with her parents, she drinks tea with Moira, takes the baby away from Nora when she’s executed all her supposed motherly duties over her brother. She still keeps her blades, even if they don’t work anymore, even if she doesn’t bleed anymore. “My family's here now.”

“It's not enough.” It hits her like a train how well he really knows her. Despite the few months during which they got to know each other, despite how long it’s been since they last talked, he knows her better than her own mother, who only cares about the fucking baby, better than her own father that treats her like a patient. “You need someone.”

She shakes her head. What surprises her the most is that he can’t tell she thinks Gabriel is a fucking asshole. “Not him.”

“Then what do you want?” She’s on the verge of breaking him. She knows he’s as lonely as her, that he drags his lifeless existence out just because he doesn’t have another choice. The worst part is that she knows why he did what he did. All of it.

“What I wanted was you.” It’s brutally honest because she can’t hide it anymore.

He stops dead on his tracks, the knife millimeters away from the guy’s throat. “You told me to go away.” She knows she’s breaking his heart, stomping over the shards, stabbing him with the remains. She wishes she felt less guilty than she actually does, that she could think he actually deserved to be treated like this. She wishes she wasn’t breaking her own heart too.

“Yeah.”

Most of all, she wishes she was doing this for Gabriel and not for her own benefit.

“But I never said goodbye.” He almost drops the knife to the ground with the weight of all the helpless hope she’s just given him. “Come let me say goodbye.”

There’s not a single flick of hesitation as he moves towards her, letting go of Gabriel like he meant nothing, like she is the entire center of his world. Everything seems to be in slow motion as he cups her cheeks and captures her lips with his own, her breath hitches in her throat, her knuckles brushing along the skin of his jaw.

Gabriel leaves, and she lingers what has to be stopped, shivers as he bites her lip, covers his hands with hers. She remembers her mom and a pool of blood in the middle of the living room, two babies, her dad hanging from the third-floor railing. They break away for air.

“Good-bye, Tate.”

She’s gone before she could hear him cry.

 

___

 

Tate goes back to try and have the usual sessions with her dad, even though her dad just insults him these days, tells him there’s nothing that can be done to cure a psychopath like him. Calls him a charismatic, compelling, pathological liar.

Yet he somehow forgets his own daughter borderlines the very same definition.

Tate keeps trying though, like the effort would make it worth it. Maybe he’s trying to forgive himself with infinite sessions.

One day she overhears Tate ask if he thinks she will ever be able to forgive him.

She can’t bring herself to hear what her father tells him, but the feeling lingers in her heart, in the core of her soul, coated in self-revulsion, that she wishes she could.

Violet feels like she’s fighting some sort of unholy war against herself, she’s floating in a controversial feeling that goes against all reasoning she likes to believe she still has left. But there are days, and hours and minutes, where she longs to go to the ocean. Wash her pain. Get dragged out of sight. But they're prisoners in a windowless cell. He haunts her. Night and day. Day and night. Never shows his face, but she knows he comes up to the room, where the faint scent of his sweaters loiters and the chalk gets smaller each day.

He lingers. He haunts her. But can the dead haunt the dead?

It’s been six, maybe seven years. Constance joins them all, at some point, leaving her brother to join a satanic cult. The house smells like mold, in spite of Moira’s efforts, the grass is brown. Despite the price, the tours of real estate have stopped. Sometimes she likes to stand on the window as the horror bus tour passes, just to mortify the ones who still look. The last inhabitants were a couple whose baby Nora stole every night, about 1 year before. They left within 2 months of arriving.

She stole an LP reader from them, just in case she gets electricity again.

There are still break ins, by those who dare, and those are the fun nights since she welcomes even the meekest distraction, but even those have slowed over the years.

He leaves ‘ _I Love You’s’_ on the chalk walls of the room for her from time to time, and she lingers with her head against the wall a moment too long before erasing them. 

They should have met at a party like normal teenagers living normal lives, talking about trivialities such as school or friends.  

 

___

 

Violet likes to think of them as Orpheus and Eurydice retold, except he isn’t even alive and she can no longer be saved. Either way, the moment she dies he’s moving heaven and hell to get her back, dragging her into a shower to revive her, still feels the pressure of his fingers down her throat, the trail of kisses and tears he kept on leaving down her neck. What he doesn’t understand was that he lost her because of what he couldn’t help himself to be in the past, maybe even now.

Orpheus didn’t look back.

She did.

___

 

She has no idea how many years have passed when she fully accepts the lifeless part of her condition of being permanently deceased, seventeen or so, she thinks. She just sort of gives up, she stops forcing herself to blend in with her family, stops trying to put on a mask of chirpiness she never really had while she was still breathing, let alone now, in the midst of chaos. So she just stops, she stops erasing them, every word he ever wrote on the chalkboard walls of their room. She collects them, treasures them. He keeps on writing them for her until the walls are full and the chalk has rotten off just like everything else in their lives.

Once he told her it was going to be her and him, forever and always. She can’t remember if she was already dead then, but the words still make her restless, even with all the people in the house, there’s always nothing but him and her. He’s always the one she wants to go back to.

They meet out in the attic once after that, unexpectedly, to play with Beau, to play house with the girls. It’s a shock but neither of them leaves, nor broaches the topic. Today, after so long spent alone, after craving the simplest kiss, the quietest brush of skins, it would be a nuisance. She knows how the kids always remind him of Addie, of how much he misses her.

When she leaves, Violet shuts the door of the bedroom, hinges groaning underneath her touch. She closes her eyes, leaning her back against the wood and pretends she doesn’t feel the cold weight that persists on squeezing her chest.

They're relinquished lovers, and it bothers her too much.

But as they say: Flashes of familiar things that cause familiar afflictions.

 

___

 

One day, twenty years too late, two new strangers surprisingly take a leap of fate and decide to buy the house. One is a movie star and the other one is clearly gay but the nuthouse plot of her story thickens even further because they claim to be witches and come asking concerning questions about her living brother and almost – she takes a deep breath - almost step son, because that’s how fucked up life gets when you are emotionally unable to stop loving a boy who somehow became a psychopath along the way. The movie star is blonde, tall and dressed in such a short skirt and a pair of heels that could almost make her obnoxious. She’s beautiful and she smirks arrogantly because she knows the exactly effect she has on people. She’s exactly the type of girl who would have bullied her if she was still in high school wishing to be dead instead of actually being so.

Yet, Madison Montgomery levels with her, on her knees, near the stairway and by a carpet that’s almost completely rotten off. Her eyes seem sympathetic and there’s not a single trace of scorn in them as Violet tries to hastily wipe her tears. Most importantly, she says things, things that no one bothered to tell her for over twenty years, things her parents kept from her, things that could have unclouded her judgement.

“I think what happened to Tate was different.” she says, softly, with a look on her face that tells her that this is not the most fucked up shit she’d ever seen, anyway, so why bother. “He wasn’t the real evil here.”

Violet tries to shut her out, tries to shut up this immense, catastrophic feeling that’s been building up within her for years. Tries to pretend it doesn't even affect her. She hates herself for it, hates how someone like him, someone who should be object of all her hatred, manages to get her heart to speed up. It’s been over fifteen years and she's weak and this feels so much stronger than her. Madison waits, and she finds her voice again, hoarse and weak, but still there, almost as if she hadn’t spoken for years. Maybe she hadn’t, who’s counting. “What does that even mean?”  

“My guess? Any evil inside Tate left with Michael.” Maddison exhales softly, her eyes sad. “Blame him for the decisions he did make, not the house.”

Violet is lost in the anarchy, the immensity, the oblivion of her feelings. They’re like dust, like light and darkness all at once and she can't locate herself amidst the chaos. She lets go of a breath she's been holding for over ten years, slowly, her lungs as arrhythmical as her heart and she lets the new information unfold itself right before her eyes.

She’s not sure she’s ready to go by this path again, eternity is a long tunnel and it’s a long way to be the canary that calls out the expiry date. But the visions were something, they show him, warm eyes and careful hands, trying to help her mother, begging her father for help before it became too late for him, for them. They show her him, writing in the chalkboards red eyed, tear stricken and with his delicate, unusual features, looking down at the words so unremittingly sad, patiently waiting for her to find him, call him back.

And it triggers something in her.

She can’t quite put a finger around what it is, but it’s there, causing goosebumps to rise across her cold skin.

So she does call him, for the first time in too many years, twenty plus too late to be precise, and she barely lets him talk, let’s him apologize, him and his soft voice and sad eyes and that ridiculously well scented sweater he wears, despite the fact that they’re all dead, because she’s too eager to let go of everything that has haunted her even though nothing is really solved.  His hands cup her cheeks and his forehead meets hers, her nose just barely grazing his as her hands reach out to embrace his arms. Her heart rages, it no longer beats but it does a full gymnastics routine, storms the entire hollow cavity. She knows she picking sides in the unholy war, and she knows she’s picking wrong.

But then again, why else would he smell like home? He looks at her for the first time in a long time, too long, his eyes shining, holding her gaze, as if he so much as blinked, she’d disappear forever.

Why else would it feel as right as it did when she reaches out and kisses the soft skin of his cheek?

 

____

 

Just days later, the dead awake from their muddled and pugnacious slumber and are granted the very freedom they wait a whole year to achieve. Violet beams, as bright as the sun. Her heart metaphorically thrums in her chest. She beams as her converse scrape the edge of the moldy entrance door and the purest breeze kisses her skin. She’s boundless and untamed and she’s a conundrum at the core of her very own existence, poking fun at itself. She’s not free, she knows she’s not, nor is her heart. She’s no longer the sixteen-year-old girl who met a cute boy when she moved houses. No, now she’s spent too much time wondering whatever love means for it to be this easy.

The sunlight streams slowly, taking its sweet time enveloping them. In another world, it would be easy. In another world, the way he circles his arms around her waist, the way his breath hitches at the back of her neck, would never leave her to duel on her morality.

But the thing is, they’re not in another world, and Madison’s words echo themselves off walls, off windows and off chalkboards. Is he guiltless? Was it really just the house? Constance?

She catches a small glimpse of dirty blond hair at the corner just before the house’s main hall and she finds herself brushing her eyes shut, the anxiety leaving her body. In another world, Violet would be able to hate him, would be able to steer clear of the danger he represented to them all.

But they’re not in another world.

Violet is still beaming when she takes slow, careful steps, like she's learning to walk again, and meets him outside on the dawn before her twenty first Halloween, the second she would ever spend with him and he holds out a black rose on his hand, shakily, afraid after too many years of rejections.

She knits herself together. She takes it.

 

___

 

That night they make love, slowly, tenderly, in the room they shared. They’re demonically aware that they literally have all the time in the world, but all the regret of wasted years at the same time, and they’re still human, despite how long it’s been since their heart actually pumped, and humans make up for wasted time in despair, in passion.

She kisses every scar left by bullets on his chest, her way of showing him she’s over it, that it’s been years since the last time it mattered to her. The dead live inconsequently, erratically blameless for every life they took, every car they stole, every single penny they kept. She’s no exception. Time makes you indifferent, and time is infinite for the deceased.

As her lips trail the path of the seventeen bullet wounds, she wonders if Tate remembers dying, wonders if anyone tried to save him like he did for her. Maybe Constance, but she doesn’t visit him anymore, doesn’t visit any of them anymore.

He kisses her neck, her nose, the back of her hands, and Violet can’t help but to feel enthralled as to how exhilarating it all feels, to finally feel loved by the one person who was able to love her for who she truly was, no shits deluded, no matter how deranged they both might have become over the years. It feels hazy, magnetic, like the beginning of a drug. It all culminates when she comes and utters a panted ‘ _I love you’_ , and she’s awake enough to see the jubilant, full dimpled grin he gives her.

“I love you, too.” She rests her head on the soft spot on which his heart used to beat. “So much, Vi. So fucking much.” He continues, nuzzling his head against her hair, his hand stroking hers. “You don’t hurt the ones you love, and I hurt you.” He pauses and exhales, gathering whatever courage he needs. “I’m sorry, Vi. For all it’s worth, I really am.”

The dead are unapologetic. Love is not. She places a kiss over his heart.

She hasn’t forgiven him, she doesn’t know if this is something you can forgive. But she’s over it or as over it you can get in twenty years. Maybe in another ten she’ll get to say it.

She slumps into a dreamless sleep feeling safe and warm for the first time she’s been dead.

 

___

 

Maybe they’re Hades and Persephone, instead. Her, abducted from the world of the living, him, engulfed by gloom.

 _You’re the only light I’ve ever known._ The words echo to another time, the same ridiculous place, yet it feels different now.

She believes him, now more than ever as she recalls his words, like they were said yesterday and not ten, twenty, thirty years ago. But whatever light she had left is diminishing if not all gone and she can’t bring herself to care.

She leaves with him every single Halloween now, despite her parents reprimanding and condescending glances. It’s like their own equinox, as so to match the story.

They steal a car and go around chasing kids, running red lights and bottling up as much vodka as they can and only hope to get drunk or as drunk as the dead can get. They get an exorbitant amount of packs of cigarettes to last them through the year. They only come back at dawn, hand in hand, without regrets.

 

___

 

She’s done with the metaphorical bullshit.

She’s dead.

There is no meaning, no reason to follow morals. It’s all entropy and reckless abandon, all dismissive and racked with eternal dismay.

It’s like every day is a late-night spiral stretched into eternity. She has no idea how many years it’s been since her tainted corpse started putrefying off in the basement, but she figures there are no flying cars outside, if that’s any good indication of anything.

She wonders what will happen to all of them if they demolish the house.

Maybe it’s another approach at life, if we could ever call it that, maybe it’s just something else to try and move her out of bed when she stopped having one about sixteen years after she was born, let alone forty-five plus years after she’s been dead.

But when his thumb sweeps a pattern of broad strokes across her cheek, she could swear, for the life of her (pun intended), it feels like something else, like some sort of unearthly experience, a transgression to everything divine. It feels like a sin, a far off dream she’s forbidden to have.

Madison Montgomery's words no longer thread themselves through her veins, no longer carry the same weight they did years ago. Maybe it was the house, maybe it was him. She realizes she no longer cares. Who knows, maybe the house got to her too.

She likes to think of them as Orpheus and Eurydice and Hades and Persephone sometimes, but despite how enrapturing it all sounds, she knows they're different.

"Violet?" He asks, breathlessly from next to her on the bed, his voice still sleep ridden and eyes half shut.

A smiles dances on her lips, her hands reaching out to tuck a lock of his hair back into place. "Yeah?"

"What made you stay?" He whispers.

She knows what he means. She never had any option but to stay in this ghost infested house, but she did change her mind, and she stayed,  _with him, for them_. Almost sixty years later on, they're practically married in all ways but the legal one. She wonders maybe if they should do it, years onward, in one of those Halloween nights, just head into a casino or something and do it.

Violet knows they're not Orpheus and Eurydice because looking back didn't ruin them, it only changed them. They're not Hades and Persephone either because this isn't hell. It can't be, not when that full dimpled grin of his appears unannounced, taking her breath away, not when the way he traces lazy patterns across her skin gives her everything she needs to mend her heart. At best, this is like the Fields of Asphodel, eternity stretched and guiltless. But it feels like more than that, better than that. More like Elysium, even though they've both done enough never to be allowed in.

Besides she could never be Persephone because lord knows she's never been nor will she ever be the goddess of flowers nor will he ever start growing pomegranates in their basement, thank you very much.

She doesn't want to tell him a witch made her second guess her feelings because she knows he's been scared of asking this question for the past forty years or more. But she doesn't lie either. "You waited forever for me."

Tate links his fingers with hers, anchoring them both down to earth. "I would have waited more if I had to."

"I know." She smiles, unbridled and utterly smitten because she can't help it. "It was the words on the chalkboard. And the black rose on our second halloween." He lets go of a breath he's been holding, and she takes the chance to thread an arm across his chest. "Even when everything was going to shit, you still remembered."

"You've changed, Tate. I might have not known that for a long time, but I do know that now."

 

___

 

They're not Orpheus or Eurydice or Hades or Persephone because they don't need to be. They're not anybody else because they're the thrums in each others hearts, the blooming feeling in each others stomachs and the skin flutters in each others touches, those that somehow never stopped, not even when they both died.

Time doesn't pass for the dead, she knows that much. Eternity comes in waves, slow and effortful, but he should know, he's been dead longer than her. Tate's eyes lazily trace her features, and she leans into the touch of his hand as a small slice of moonlight makes its way toward them through the window. She moves closer to him then, tilting her head up to his, tip of her nose just grazing the smooth curve of his neck. She's a prisoner, but she vaguely recalls Tate once mentioning that the house became the better place since they met. It took her a while but she can vouch for that.

Time feels atrociously slow in death, yes.

But its been over sixty years and his eyes still glint when he looks at her and maybe, just maybe, as the future creeps up on them, it's not so bad. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much, I hope that wasn't that bad  
> please let me know what you think in the comments :)


End file.
